We’re all suspicious readers now.

Fascinating experiment. Big Law is under pressure to rethink its billing system -- which relies heavily on junior associates -- and one would think LLM products could replace some of this labour. Will the JDs who graduate from departments where products are banned thrive in this environment or not?

Another look at the Guardian Top 100 novels using @jtauber.com data. This uses broad periods and captures how much each period makes up different voter's lists. It's not surprising that academics lean towards pre-1945 texts but what struck me was that modernism is less important to journalists.

I supplemented @jtauber.com guardian top 100 data with publication date to produce this network graph. The lines connect books if they're on the same list (and the slide at the top adjust the min number of lists). twilliams81.github.io/guardian-nov...

The Arsenal. Your Premier League champions.

Reposting this from the weekend -- I am trying to create a stable(ish) modernist corpus and would like to use syllabi so if anyone has any experience with Open Syllabus, please let me know.

There are few things more satisfying than getting a four and a half month old who has breezed through his morning naps to sleep.

Has anyone used Open Syllabus before? I wanted to see if its Explore Syllabus function would help me curate a set of modernist syllabi. The idea being to create a snapshot of “modernism” as it is taught

All the philosophy students who pursued their passion made a wise decision. Learning how to think is a always a good investment. Psychology grads are not doing too badly on the job market either.

I wonder what Instructure’s future looks like. Not just because of The Hack, but because agentic coding tools make it much easier for universities to build / maintain LMS infrastructure. Maybe this is just swapping one kind of dependency for another but open source models help.

This is not an uncommon outcome. Hacker groups run sophisticated operations with customer service portals to ensure support during payment. There is a whole ecosystem surrounding data theft at scale

So two / three party politics in Britain seems to be over after local election results. Is this the end for first past the post? It seems to me that labour and conservatives might be incentivised to favour PR to cling to some relevance while Reform and Greens will want to lock in their position.

Universities will need to get copies of data stored in Canvas from Instructure and analyse it in great detail to understand their legal obligations. It’s going to take real grunt work to get through all that.

Shiney Hunters are also a nasty lot. Some of these hacking groups are so well organised and have customer service portals to negotiate through.

The Canvas hack will be costly for the affected universities. The university is responsible for the student data in an LMS and they will have to demonstrate that they diligently assessed Instructure. The legal fees — and institutional time — working through this will divert other resources too.

This is an amazing story. Awarding yourself a prize isn’t the problem here but profiting from it is. That it took a decade to uncover a bloke from France gave himself a medal says a good deal about social life of prestige.

We're co-sponsoring a new funded pair fellowship round (due 5/15) for a UVA faculty+grad student to explore how high-performance computing could support your humanities research questions. Think things that your laptop can't handle: big 3D, image, audio, text etc datasets; machine learning; etc+

"Even the most high-art novel is still a commodity to be traded for money—and literary fiction is only sacred when such business is invisible." Tom Williams on Laura B. McGrath’s “Middlemen”: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/middlemen-literary-agents-american-publishing-industry-laura-mcgrath

"While the focus of the book can at times make the profession look more powerful and more organized than it is in practice, this is not a flaw." Tom Williams on Laura B. McGrath’s “Middlemen”: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/middlemen-literary-agents-american-publishing-industry-laura-mcgrath/

I reviewed the very smart Middlemen by Laura B. McGrath for @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social It’s the first book to seriously consider the effect of literary agents on the American novel. lareviewofbooks.org/article/midd...

Added saline solution to 3:1 tanquery ten martini. It really boosts the citrus and so I approve.

One of the most beautiful places in America, The Northern Mariana Islands in the the Northwest Pacific, was hit by super typhoon Sinlaku. The damage is enormous and recovery will take months. The NYT covered it but events on America's pacific fringes are often ignored www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/w...

Does anyone have insight into how “Proquest Biographies” of authors/historical figures are created? I’ve copied a (paywalled) link to one example below This is the resource one of my grad students believes used/stole his dissertation research—they’re encyclopedia-style but include zero citations

Maximising access to high performance computing clusters this morning to test LLM performance. Very lucky to be able to do this and be able to leverage powerful computing tools to do so.

This is amazing’

This is an amazing opportunity to leverage UVa’s compute power in pursuit of humanities questions. Happy to share my experience applying just year if anyone would like to talk.

Working on this right now!

I find data such a useful way into textual analysis and I think that it brings real insight. But the problem is that it takes me so long that I read less. How do you balance data-orientated research with more traditional library work?

I once wrote to the actor Geoffrey Palmer about writing a memoir (I was working as an agent at the time). He took the time to call me up and tell me, in about 15 seconds or so, that he didn’t want to do it and then hung up. I was so shocked I’m not sure I spoke at all.

It’s always sad to lose books pages. It makes me wonder though if generalist book coverage has/had much impact on the market. I always assumed — based on my v limited experience— that focused papers like LRB / TLS/LARB are more effective because of their audience.

Advanced level parenting is eating while baby wearing and then not spilling food on worn baby. It is beyond my skills right now.

V DC moment -- overhearing a neighbour complain that their next door neighbour is a congressman who is away and hasn't shovelled the snowcrete in front of their house.

I am very lucky in that I get to use UVA's high performance computing services for my work but it means I've become an obsessive refresher of Active Jobs. It's quite a shift from playing with jupyter notebooks and the anticipation is something else.

Why does American etiquette not specify when to use Yours sincerely or Yours faithfully? I had this hammered into me as a child and was met by disbelief when I mentioned it to my American wife.

I haven’t been back to LA for more than 15 years but Cole’s was a great place to eat when I lived there. We used to spend plenty of boozy nights downtown too and I always imagined that it vibrancy had persisted. A shame that it’s been lost. airmail.news/sh/V5hPrr

I am lucky to live in Washington DC, close to a marine barracks. One of the stranger moments I experience is the occasional sunrise (American) national anthem drifting towards me and my sleeping son. That, and the low-flying helicopters thudding over, make it impossible to forget where we live.

Today I changed the cartridge in my shower faucet. This involved learning that faucets require cartridges and manipulating a retention pin in 4 dimensions to make it fit.

Little piece of news from the break

F1 was mediocre at best. A lot of talent and potential but hemmed in by a poor script / story line. Off to a good start in Christmas Movie Marathon

If only there was a name for the day after Christmas Day…To make it memorable.

10 days out from B-Day and biggest parenting challenging so far: folding the damn snoo box into a stable enough package that it can be kept somewhere out of the way.

This chart is an attempt to understand the influence Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen had on 19th century fiction. It’s the result of a PCA analysis and plots the closeness of a reference set (of2.5k novels) are to Austen and Edgeworth each decade. The lower the line the more closer / more similar

Sad to learn of death of Tom Stoppard. One of my favourite facts about him was that he wrote all the dialogue for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade but was uncredited.

Yes please come! We’ll be loading up local LLM’s and using statistical tests to assess success.

Anyone know what is happening in NW DC? Roads closed from North Capitol and lots of police.

Sage advice from app designed to prepare me for fatherhood

Glad I live in world where when you ask for brine at the deli they give you a bucket of the stuff. It’s a 3-olive martini day. Happy Thanksgiving to all

TRUMP [after spending 5 minutes with Zohran]: surplus value, it’s a very wonderful thing, very wonderful, and they’re stealing it. Can you believe that? We’re going to be looking very strongly at the bourgeoisie, what they’re up to

Thank you for coming!

UVA people, please join us tomorrow at 11am in The Scholar’s Lab where I’ll be talking with Professor Adrienne Ghaly about our use of LLM’s to look for biodiversity in nineteenth century prose fiction. There’s lunch and we’re looking for feedback on our work.